The former director of the South Carolina Poetry Initiative, Kwame Dawes is a prolific author and editor with publications in many genres. He has written sixteen collections of poetry, most recently Back of Mount Peace and Wheels. Dawes won an Emmy Award for his poetry and reporting on HIV/AIDS in his native Jamaica, and he is also the recipient of a Pushcart Prize, the Forward Poetry Prize, and the Hollis Summers Poetry Prize. Dawes is the Glenna Luschei Editor of Prairie Schooner and a Chancellor’s Professor of English at the University of Nebraska–Lincoln.|South Carolina Poet Laureate Marjory Wentworth's poems have been nominated for the Pushcart Prize four times. Her collections of poetry include Noticing Eden, Despite Gravity, What the Water Gives Me, and The Endless Repetition of an Ordinary Miracle. Wentworth is also the author of an award-winning children’s book, Shackles, and of Taking a Stand: The Evolution of Human Rights, with Juan E. M éndez.

“The work written by these seven poets both proves and shatters the notion of a southern aesthetic. These are strikingly distinctive voices, but the fact that they come from this state reminds us that ideas of what is southern and what is South Carolinian have to be constantly reassessed, and these poets are wonderfully different in their interests and focus.”—Kwame Dawes, from the introduction

The former director of the South Carolina Poetry Initiative, Kwame Dawes is a prolific author and editor with publications in many genres. He has written sixteen collections of poetry, most recently Back of Mount Peace and Wheels. Dawes won an Emmy Award for his poetry and reporting on HIV/AIDS in his native Jamaica, and he is also the recipient of a Pushcart Prize, the Forward Poetry Prize, and the Hollis Summers Poetry Prize. Dawes is the Glenna Luschei Editor of Prairie Schooner and a Chancellor’s Professor of English at the University of Nebraska–Lincoln.|South Carolina Poet Laureate Marjory Wentworth's poems have been nominated for the Pushcart Prize four times. Her collections of poetry include Noticing Eden, Despite Gravity, What the Water Gives Me, and The Endless Repetition of an Ordinary Miracle. Wentworth is also the author of an award-winning children’s book, Shackles, and of Taking a Stand: The Evolution of Human Rights, with Juan E. M éndez.

“The work written by these seven poets both proves and shatters the notion of a southern aesthetic. These are strikingly distinctive voices, but the fact that they come from this state reminds us that ideas of what is southern and what is South Carolinian have to be constantly reassessed, and these poets are wonderfully different in their interests and focus.”—Kwame Dawes, from the introduction

The former director of the South Carolina Poetry Initiative, Kwame Dawes is a prolific author and editor with publications in many genres. He has written sixteen collections of poetry, most recently Back of Mount Peace and Wheels. Dawes won an Emmy Award for his poetry and reporting on HIV/AIDS in his native Jamaica, and he is also the recipient of a Pushcart Prize, the Forward Poetry Prize, and the Hollis Summers Poetry Prize. Dawes is the Glenna Luschei Editor of Prairie Schooner and a Chancellor’s Professor of English at the University of Nebraska–Lincoln.|South Carolina Poet Laureate Marjory Wentworth's poems have been nominated for the Pushcart Prize four times. Her collections of poetry include Noticing Eden, Despite Gravity, What the Water Gives Me, and The Endless Repetition of an Ordinary Miracle. Wentworth is also the author of an award-winning children’s book, Shackles, and of Taking a Stand: The Evolution of Human Rights, with Juan E. M éndez.

“The work written by these seven poets both proves and shatters the notion of a southern aesthetic. These are strikingly distinctive voices, but the fact that they come from this state reminds us that ideas of what is southern and what is South Carolinian have to be constantly reassessed, and these poets are wonderfully different in their interests and focus.”—Kwame Dawes, from the introduction